John Mahoney Quick Links

'Frasier' actor John Mahoney passed away at the age of 77 this week while in a hospice in Chicago. Tributes have begun rolling in across various social media platforms from fellow actors and film industry titans, remembering his great work in television, cinema and theatre.

John Mahoney at the premiere of 'Flipped'

The star, who is best known for playing Kelsey Grammer's onscreen father Martin Crane in 'Frasier', is reported to have died on Sunday (February 4th 2018) after a short battle with cancer while receiving hospice care. His publicist confirmed the news to TMZ, while his the theatre group to which he belonged, Steppenwolf, made a statement on social media.

Hogarth Hughes is an intelligent young boy with a love of exploring. One day, his adventurous nature leads him to discover a colossal iron giant living in the forest having fallen from space. The robot appears to have the understanding of a child and thus finds himself vulnerable to the dangers of the earth and oblivious to his fate should the government find out about him. When Hogarth realises this and that the iron giant just wants to be his friend, he does everything within his power to keep him safe, even if that means lying to the government agents and army officials who come sniffing around for information. Hogarth is just 9-years-old, but he finds himself having to explain the way the world works to this confused creature, including mortality, sacrifice and the rules of right and wrong.

When Bryce and his family move to a new neighbourhood, his next door neighbour is a girl of the same age called Juli is infatuated with him from the first moment her eyes spotted him. From that moment on, she knows Bryce is the boy for her; the only problem is Bryce isn't convinced that she's the girl for him.

Clint Eastwood was a legend a long time before Wolfgang Petersen decided to cast him as an aging Secret Service agent trying to derail a psychopath who's trying to assassinate the President. But Petersen's movie, titled In the Line of Fire, benefits immensely from his history and his presence, his ironclad persona as last man standing. Sporting a well-cut suit jacket rather than a poncho and a pair of holsters, Eastwood's steely resolve still has the power to rejuvenate otherwise rote plot conventions with every sliver of his gravelly voice, as if questioning his opponents' manhood with every flick of an adverb.

Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, the kind of man who comes home after a long day of booby-trapping money counterfeiters and wants nothing else than to get out of his suit, drink a good glass of bourbon, and listen to Kind of Blue. Just as he's settling into one of these comfortable slumps, he receives a phone call from a man who calls himself Booth (John Malkovich). Sober and staid, Booth tells Frank that he's going to kill the president. The fact that Booth's deserted apartment is found with a singular photo of Frank when he was an agent under JFK underlines Horrigan's conviction.

It has been a while since I've seen an actor single-handedly elevate merely fair material with a transcendental performance.

Steve Carell is the Dan of Real Life, and his touching turn as an unassuming newspaper columnist and father of three girls exists on a level above the film's perfectly acceptable cast -- no small feat considering that Dianne Wiest, John Mahoney, and Juliette Binoche contribute to the ensemble.

The song-and-dance numbers are out. The cheery sidekicks are nowhere to be seen. The predictable villains in black are nonexistent. This summer, Disney comes out with both guns blazing, literally, in its newest animated feature Atlantis: The Lost Empire, an imaginative and eye-popping mix of action, adventure, and sweeping vision landscapes filled with gorgeous computer enhanced animation.

Continuing on its recent arc of solid storylines in its animation and quality visuals, Atlantis is successful in both being a wide-eyed roller-coaster ride for kids and is interesting enough to keep adults from passing out from boredom. The film follows the adventures of Milo Thatch (Michael J. Fox), a bookworm/boiler room attendant/linguistics expert who probably hasn't had a date in years. Milo's grandfather was an explorer looking for Atlantis who knew where to discover the location of the lost city -- in a hidden journal. With the help of eccentric billionaire Preston Whitmore (John Mahoney), the lost journal is recovered, providing new clues to Atlantis's whereabouts. Milo then joins a group of rag-tag explorers -- including a 200-person Navy, enough surplus to take over a small county, and no cute sidekicks -- in the search for the city of Atlantis.

In the early days of animation, Warner Brothers cartoons spawned out of a desire to displace the overtly conservative and often sappy Disney characters. Bugs, Daffy, and Porky Pig were a little more rambunctious, daring, and raunchy than their Disney counterparts setting a new trend in children's entertainment that was widely accepted. While Disney is still king of the animated feature film (The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast) the Warner Brothers product seems to be a bit less inhibited with it's brand of humor, (Space Jam) appealing to both children and adults. The Iron Giant is just this kind of fun. It's a movie that the kids are going to love, which is complemented with adult humor and themes for the rest of the audience to appreciate.

Set in 1957, young Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) is fascinated with the lore of an old fisherman who declares that he has seen a UFO crash and a giant creature emerge from the ocean. Against his mother's (Jennifer Aniston) wishes, Hughes searches the forest surrounding his hometown of Rockwell, Maine until he finds and rescues the 50-foot robot-like-creature being shocked to death after an attempt to eat a power plant. The two become friends and with the help of junk-yard owner/artist/beatnik Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.) they manage to hide the giant from the rest of the town. This becomes increasingly difficult because of the giant's voracious appetite for metal and the presence of Government Agent Chuck Mansley (Christopher McDonald) who keeps snooping around town trying to learn more about this mysterious giant robot that locals keep reporting. The giant can't stay hidden for long and when it is finally discovered a climactic conclusion ensues.

By now you know the drill: Disney follows up just about every animated movie, large or small, with a quicky DVD that can't hope to compare with the original film.

Kronk's New Groove, the successor to the tragically underseen The Emperor's New Groove, is really no different. As the title suggests, the sequel focuses on Kronk (Patrick Warburton), a relatively minor character in the original film (he was the hapless and oblivious bodyguard of the villain), who's now made good in his life as a restaurateur.

With his sophomore effort, She's the One, Edward Burns has made another movie about Irish Catholic brothers that do stupid things to the women they love. Like his first film, The Brothers McMullen, this story is set in and around New York City, and stars Mike McGlone and Burns himself as the aforementioned brothers (only two this time). Also in the mix once again is Maxine Bahns, Burn's real-life love interest, who again stars as Burns's... love interest.

This time around, Burns once again plays slacker to McGlone's uptight business-oriented younger brother. Burns's Mickey, a contented laid-back cab driver, falls in love (with Bahns) and gets married on 24 hours notice. This is ridiculed by his brother Francis (McGlone), who is experiencing relationship problems of his own in the form of a deep-rooted affair that threatens to break up his marriage. The two brothers' problems are linked together by the fact that Francis's young mistress, played by Cameron Diaz, is Mickey's ex-fiancee.

Disney animated features have never been known for their originality, but their creators almost always craft delightful entertoonment from threadbare grab bags of clichés and contrived plot devices.

This year's regularly scheduled summer cartoon release is a perfect example of this principle. "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" is a grand-scale archeological adventure that, if it were live-action, would be the kind of campy, glossy, bottom-rung syndicated stuff you find padding the prime-time schedules of the UPN and WB networks.

It's populated with an unlikely racial balance of stock characters -- a muscle-man African-American doctor (voice of Phil Morris), a sassy teenage Latina tomboy mechanic (Jacqueline Obradors) -- most of whom are mercenaries ("adventure capitalists," one proffers) on a quest for the legendary ancient city in the title. The catalyst for the endeavor is, of course, an eccentric millionaire (voiced by John Mahoney) who funds the expedition.